Cadence teams with Wind River, rolls verification platform

SAN FRANCISCOEDA vendor Cadence Design Systems Inc. Tuesday (April 27) announced a partnership with embedded software vendor Wind River Systems Inc. and introduced an integrated verification computing platform said to unify simulation, acceleration and emulation into a single verification environment.

Cadence (San Jose, Calif.) also outlined a new application-driven approach to system design and development, described as a blueprint for countering the semiconductor industry's greatest threat. Cadence calls its new vision for the industry EDA360.

The technical collaboration between Cadence and Wind River aims to integrate the Cadence Incisive software extensions and Wind River's Simics virtual platform, Cadence said. The company said it expects this approach to enable engineers to develop electronic designs on a virtual platform well in advance of hardware availability.

The verification computing platform, known as Palladium XP, will enable design and verification teams to bring up their hardware/software environment faster and produce better quality embedded systems in a shorter time, Cadence said.

Palladium XP supports design configurations up to 2 billion gates, delivering performance up to 4 MHz and supporting up to 512 users simultaneously, Cadence said. The platform also provides system-level solutions, including low-power analysis and metric-driven verification, the company said.

"This is truly super computer level," said John Bruggeman, Cadence chief marketing officer, in an interview with EE Times. Bruggeman, formerly chief marketing officer at Wind River, said that while hardware developers are accustomed to waiting long periods for verification, software developers need super speeds.

Palladium XP provides developers with a high-fidelity representation of their design so they can locate and fix bugs, resulting in better quality IP, subsystems, SoCs and systems, according to Cadence. Design teams can "hot swap" simulation with acceleration and emulation in a scalable verification environment as needed, which speeds the verification process and enables early access to testing embedded software and evaluating performance implications of different IP and/or system architectures, the company said.

Cadence's EDA360 vision maintains issues a challenge to the semiconductor and EDA communities to address the growing "profitability gap" that threatens the vitality of the electronics industry, the company said.
Cadence said EDA is at a crossroads and must change in order to continue as an independent market, or else it will struggle to solve the increasingly complex problems customers are facing now and in the future.

Despite the consumer demand for electronics, development practices are choking the innovation that current technology makes possible, according to Cadence. EDA360 outlines an application-driven development model where hardware is designed and developed to dynamically meet the needs of the application, Cadence said. The full document can be downloaded here.